Quote Originally Posted by Melichoir View Post
Emet wasnt an idiot and a blowhard. If anything, I think that while he did get mad at you for not living up to his standards, I think that anger is because on some level he probably did want you to and was angry you werent quite there. Him fighting you was to goad you into rising to the occassion and becoming someone with the potential to be an equal and prove that you and everyone else are not just things but actual living things, even if its fully understood that he might and probably will die should that happen. Pair this with the melancholy at the end, and I think that he was at the end just tired of it all and really didnt want to keep it up.
The thing that struck me as interesting is that the Ascians are basically in a role which, looked at from a different angle, could 100% be the normal protagonist role of some JPRG. Imagine that you have a JRPG where there's a world-shattering cataclysm and the world is broken into several different 'shards'. Your hero survives, and now finds themselves traveling from shard to see, seeing pale and distorted reflections of people they know -- things that are just a part of them, not the whole. The story presents it as though none of these shards are real, as though all the people you meet are hollow fragments. So of COURSE the hero's arc is to find a way to combine all the shards and save all the people and bring back the world! It's the sort of storyline no one would even really think twice about in some traditional JRPG. It's not 'destroying these worlds', it's gluing the fragments of a vase back together. Sure, they stop being individual fragments, but their identity is "vase", not "random pottery shard", right? It's just repairing things!

The issue is that those 'pale echoes' and incomplete shards may disagree on whether they're just pale and lifeless echoes... and from that viewpoint -- our viewpoint in FFXIV -- the 'hero' of that hypothetical JRPG is a genocidal monster.

There's no way the WoL and allies can accept or support the Ascians' goal, but it's a goal that's almost alarmingly understandable. Because if it were the Source that were broken into pieces, and the WoL wandering between these pale echoes and seeing twisted, incomplete versions of their Scion family... can we say the WoL wouldn't find themselves in a similar place, trying to figure out how to glue their world back together?

And to some extent this figures into Shadowbringers being a contrast in letting go/moving on, as paralleled by Emet-Selch and Thancred.

Each of them has lost someone very important to them: Thancred has lost Minfilia, Emet-Selch has lost the third of member of that trio of friends (Hades, Hythlodaeus, and the Amaroutine whose name we still don't know). Each of them is now traveling in the company of someone who isn't that person they lost, but is all that's left of them; Thancred is with Ryne/"Minfilia", while Emet-Selch is with the WoL. And each of them sort of struggles to see this new person as their own person, rather than just as a pale and flawed imitation of the one they care about.

Thancred proves able to do it, albeit with effort; he can accept Ryne as Ryne and finally let Minifilia go. You could argue Emet-Selch tries, in his own twisted way; he puts the WoL through 'tests' to try to determine if they're 'as good' as the friend he lost so long ago. But in the end, he cannot move on as Thancred did. Perhaps because of his Tempering, perhaps because he's just too set in his ways after so long... but he can't do it. Maybe that's what breaks him, maybe that's what pushes him over a line. Maybe Emet-Selch wanted to 'suicide by WoL' and finally just rest, or maybe it was his Tempering again driving him to it and he genuinely expected to win. Maybe either outcome was alright with him.

But either way, unlike Thancred, he demonstrably cannot move forward; he remains trapped by the narrative of that hypothetical JRPG, unable to flip his viewpoint and let go.